Great auks (Pinguinus impennis) were large flightless birds that thrived on rocky islands in the North Atlantic for thousands ...

In June 1844, farmers Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson, along with 12 others, made the perilous journey by boat from ...

The great auk was a large seabird of the family Alcidae, a group which includes the razorbill, guillemot and puffin, breeding ...

Today, a casual observer could be forgiven for confusing the bird, a great auk, for a penguin. The black-and-white creature was clumsy on land but a torpedo in the sea. It feasted on fish and had ...

Victorian hunters, explorers and collectors feature strongly in the story of the Great Auk. The writer Kaliane Bradley places the 19th century polar explorer Commander Graham Gore at the heart of her ...

But there is a very different story told of it in Mr. Symington Grieve's important work on “The Great Auk, its history, archæology, and remains,” published in 1885. At p. 105 of this volume ...

Pictured below is the last remaining specimen of a British great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the nineteenth century. It is a lesson in what can happen to an ocean-dwelling ...

Innovative advances in DNA sequencing are making it possible to revive extinct bird species like the dodo, great auk, passenger pigeon, and others. Scientists worldwide are engaged in these ...

In his mesmerising study of the great auk and its afterlife, Tim Birkhead asks how far science itself was to blame for the bird’s extinction ...

IMAGINATION has long had a large share in the accounts given of the Gare-fowl or Great Auk, notwithstanding the efforts of those who have tried to set forth nothing but the truth on the subject ...

Jessie Greengrass’s fiction includes An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It. The Great Auk is published by Bloomsbury at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 ...

Tim Birkhead, Kaliane Bradley and Mark Nowers discuss our fascination with the Great Auk and Victorian explorers, and efforts to help turtle doves, with Tom Sutcliffe. Show more The Great Auk ...